Apple's not terribly threatening compared to Google, in my opinion. Sure, iPods are kicking Zune's *, but they had a large headstart in terms of marketshare and mindshare. WinMo still has iPhone beat for marketshare though obviously iPhones have captured
everybody's fancy. Google has more potential to disrupt Microsoft than Apple does.

Ultimately, Microsoft is its own worst enemy -- the complacency that comes with lack of real competition, the overhead and culture that comes with a very large corporation (90+K strong last I checked), and the inability to bring truly compelling products
to market is more devastating than anything Apple or Google does. And when we do a great job, we have to outdo ourselves with the next release, something that's become a bit of a challenge lately now that Moore's Law has shifted gears a bit, and we've released
umpteen versions of Windows and Office.

Contact Pete LePage (http://blogs.msdn.com/petel/contact.aspx). He used to announce new IE VPC's on his blog on a regular basis. While he may be doing other things these days, I bet he could point you
to the right person to contact about these.

They fixed this oversight recently. IE7 VHD refresh on XP SP3 is now available on the Download Center.

The HtmlAnchor class can resolve virtual paths if you use the HRef property but can't if you set the attribute via the Attributes collection, I think. Definitely, it has screwy behavior, particularly if you're trying to use named anchors, e.g., <a href="#foo">Go
to foo</a> and <a id="foo">Here's foo</a>. ASP.NET overriding the id attribute for its own purposes particularly sucks for this HtmlAnchor use case and is one of many reasons I am getting sick of WebForms. I love the low-level ASP.NET/IIS platform, but I'm
looking forward to booting WebForms as soon as ASP.NET MVC is golden.

If you're just interested in dabbling with Web development technologies, PHP is the way to go as it has the lowest learning curve of the three you mentioned (Rails, PHP, ASP.NET). The downside of that learning curve is that it also has the least to offer
when it comes to learning about Web development and programming.

Ruby's worth learning even if only in the sense that learning a new programming language expands your horizons.

Why the lucky stiff has written a DSL for GUI development called Shoes which you might find interesting. It's more interesting than Rails, in my opinion -
Shoes

Yes though I would also like to see tutorials covering classes of techniques rather than step-by-step processes.

8 out of 10, assuming 10 is highest.

I dislike designs that focus solely on visual appeal. It is important to be visually appealing but not if you sacrifice usability and functionality in the process. I favor minimalist designs with large fonts that try to keep tasks as simple as possible.
I don't like "kitchen sink" (as if everything but) or "power user" designs. I am also leery of any design that purports to be "intuitive," because usually the ones that say they are are not.